"Today Sardines Are Not For Sale is a microhistory of a single, emblematic event: the demonstration on the rue de Buci, a food protest that took place on May 31, 1942 at a central market area in occupied Paris. It was a time of dire food scarcity, escalating tensions between shoppers and merchants, an upsurge of urban guerrilla violence, and relentless repression of dissent by the authorities. The French collaborationist government at Vichy saw the demonstration as a crime against the State. For the German occupiers, it was "terrorism." For the French Communist party activists who staged the event and participated in it, it was an act of people's justice. What ultimately became known as the "Buci affair" had tragic consequences for the demonstrators and far-reaching ramifications for the underground communist resistance. How did a relatively obscure incident become a short-lived cause célèbre? Why did it mobilize the French police, the courts, and the German military authorities but fail to mobilize the public? How did the party and party activists use gender to shape the event and perceptions of it? This close-up of a single episode reveals the motivations of the committed women and men who orchestrated it, and the visible but unseen moving parts of the "above-ground underground." Today Sardines Are Not For Sale is the product of a privileged moment when it was possible to confront written sources-newly accessible police and court records---with the oral testimony of surviving participants"--

This timely volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to explore the ways that women responded to situations of immense deprivation, need, and victimization under Hitler's dictatorship. Paying acute attention to the differences that gender made, Women Defying Hitler examines the forms of women's defiance, the impact these women had, and the moral and ethical dilemmas they faced. Several essays also address the special problems of the memory and historiography of women's history during World War II, and the book features standpoints of historians as well as the voices of survivors and their descendants. Notably, this book also serves as a guide for human behaviour under extremely difficult conditions. The book is relevant today for challenging discrimination against women and for its nuanced exploration of the conditions minorities face as outspoken protagonists of human rights issues and as resisters of discrimination. From this perspective the voices being empowered in this book are clear examples of the importance of protest by women in forcing a totalitarian regime to pause and reconsider its options for the moment. In revealing so, Women Defying Hitler ultimately foregrounds that women rescuers and resisters were and are of great continuing consequence.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.